I'm sure early work in fission wasn't well-received by the established scientific minds of the time, but eventually laboratory work proved it occurred and measured the incredible amounts of energy released.

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Actually, early work in fission was well-received - because it was clearly explained and made sense.

The journey from the discovery of fission to a functional nuclear power plant (or weapon) took many years and a lot of engineering, but without the initial research, I don't think there would have been any interest.

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Nuclear fission of heavy elements was discovered in late 1938 and explained theoretically in 1939. By 1942 chain reactions were demonstrated at the University of Chicago, and industrial scale nuclear reactors to make plutonium were in operation by 1943-44. By 1945, there were working nuclear weapons and by the mid-1950s - less than 20 years after the discovery of nuclear fission of heavy elements - there were commercial nuclear power plants and nuclear-powered submarines.

I once worked with a guy who was convinced that you could run a gasoline engine on hydrogen and this could be extracted from water. There was a video which "proved" this. The electrolysis unit ran from a huge alternator in a Dodge pickup parked nearby. Then the experimenter ran a Yugo with the "Brown's gas" created by the electrolysis.

I tried to explain that the energy required to generate the gas from water would be far greater than the resulting energy from combustion, and that there was no way the large alternator could be powered by the Yugo engine, but he wasn't having any of this argument. He was a "believer".

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He simply did not understand the basic physics of what was going on. Hydrogen is a great fuel - the problem is making and storing it in sufficient quantities.

On your QRZ page you state: "But still I couldn't easily make DX contacts while I was working at my aerospace job because I found out the hard way that the US DOD security people wanted me to fill out all kinds of "foreign contact" disclosure questionare paperwork and then when I turned it in they acted like I must be guilty of something"

I know and have known many hams who worked in all areas of defense and in the military with top secret clearance and never heard of any being restricted in making foreign contacts on ham radio.

When my father applied for his Top Secret clearance, he had to provide a list of all his contacts with Communist countries - this was in the 1960s. When I got my TS, in the early 1970s, I was not required to do so. I believe the regulation is still on paper, however.

We've only recently confirmed the existence of gravity waves. Einstein spent the last decades of his life trying to find a way to link electromagnetism and gravity, theoretically.